As Anna, the mother of two college-age sons, said, “There’s a lot of tension in observing the church year. You find you’re really bucking the culture. And this is more true during Advent and Christmas than any other time of year.” She recounts a particularly “disastrous” Christmas morning fifteen years ago, which changed the way she and her family celebrated Christmas:

“There were piles and piles of paper and boxes. Everybody was glassy-eyed by 9 a.m. I found myself sitting there in the middle of the chaos, almost in tears, thinking, ‘This is awful!’ ”  

From then on, she and her family spread their gift giving over the twelve days of Christmas. “People thought we were nuts, but I found it really diffused the wretched excess of Christmas Day. The guys opened one present each day, and then they could read that book or play with that toy, rather than throwing it aside right away in order to open something else.”

There were other, unexpected benefits as well, both environmentally and financially: they recycled wrapping paper (“It became a bit of a joke,” Anna says, “to see how many times we could use the same piece of wrapping paper”), and they shopped after-Christmas sales for their gifts for the latter days of Christmas.

Hayley, the mother of two school-age boys, also spreads the giving of gifts over the twelve days of Christmas, but she wants the focus of those days to be on Christ rather than on the gifts. To this end, she has purchased twelve ornaments, one for each day of Christmas. Each ornament represents a name of Jesus and has a Scripture passage that corresponds to it. Every evening during Christmas, one of her sons chooses an ornament, hangs it on the Advent wreath that sits in the center of the dining table and reads the Scripture.

In addition, Hayley brings out the Magi for her crèche on Christmas Day, starting them in a back room or the corner of the kitchen. Over the course of the twelve days, the boys move the Magi and their camels ever closer to the manger and the stable, thus preparing them for the culmination of Christmas in the celebration of Epiphany, but also reminding them that Christmas is about seeking—and finding—Jesus.

Christmas—the season, not just the day—is supposed to be a time of joy and celebration, a time to be lingered over and delighted in. If we as the church have been actively waiting through the weeks of Advent for the coming of Christmas, then, unlike our cultural counterparts, we will not be ready to simply toss aside the Christmas season along with the wrapping paper and ribbons on December 26— and we will not need to. We will have eleven more days to celebrate with joy what my pastor calls “a long, slow Christmas.”

Kimberlee Conway Ireton lives in a cozy home in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood with her husband and two young children. She has written for Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, ThoughtfulChristian.com and Relevant magazine's Deeper Walk blog.